Top Reasons Why Your Brand is Failing at Influencer Marketing

With the rising trend of digital or online marketing, influencer marketing has become the watchword for the industry. It has become the choice of many marketers and many business owners looking for brand awareness and higher conversions. In the recent year a study has also been conducted to reveal the state of influencer marketing that was used by more than 86% of the population and amongst these numbers, around 39% were looking to increase their budget for influencer marketing looking at the short-term and long-term benefits.

The statistics also reveal that influencer marketing gives a Return on Investment to almost 11 times more than the traditional means when it comes to promoting the brand and strengthening your customer base.

However, despite of all the massive benefits, there are possibilities that brands are losing; there are brands that are failing at this type of rewarding marketing technique. Have anyone ever thought over the same and tried to understand why so? Have anyone ever got deeper into understanding where these brands are going wrong?

Surveys and studies also revealed the following statistics:

• 28% respondents of a survey found it difficult to find data for influencer marketing13% • 13% of respondents found measuring the metrics and tracking results a challenge • 9% respondents of the survey revealed that generating reports was a challenge

To have a clear insight, here are few reasons why brands fail at influencer marketing:

• Connecting with Wrong Influencers: It is very important to pick the right influencer so as to witness the success of your marketing campaign. This is most vital because if not the expected niche, social media influencers become just a lost soul in the game. However, brands make the most common mistake to collaborate with top social influencers without knowing its relevancy to your marketing campaign. Certainly, the influencer may be the top with highest number of followers but not specific to your niche. Under the scenario, the marketing campaign does not leave any influence over your audience.

• Restricting the Creative Growth and Freedom of Your Influencer: When you collaborate with influencers, it is of utmost importance that you give them the freedom of creativity. If you try to push your influencers with your own thoughts and plan, if you try to control their thoughts and actions, the marketing campaign may land into failure. Rather it is important to align your products and services with the interest of your chosen influencers and actively stay engaged.

• Paying Less to Your Influencers: Influencers do put in lot of their time and effort to create influence for your brand on your target audience. Under the scenario, if you don’t pay your influencers an appropriate compensation, there are possibilities that influencers lose interest in your campaign. At time even paying excessive compensation creates negative relationship with influencers.

• Content Density of Your Influencer is Not Appreciating: There are possibilities that the ratio of relevant content to the overall content of your influencer is not the right measure. You need to be specific for your needs and hence the content that creates influence over audience should also be specific.

• Choosing Wrong Influencer Platforms: Choosing wrong influencer platforms is another reason why brands fail at influencer marketing campaigns. When selecting channels only numbers do not work; it is also important to align your marketing campaign and your target audience with the right channel. For example, Facebook is best for cross section audience, YouTube amongst adults, Instagram amongst teens, and Snapchat for youth.

• Mixing Advertising with Marketing: Brands often make a mistake of mixing influencer advertising with influencer marketing. However, these are two different concepts. For advertising, social media influencers only post content for a brand on a pre-defined price and for marketing influencers go deeper into creating brand relationship with the target audience.

• Hoping From One Influencer to Another: Most of the brands make the mistake of changing influencer on and often and then making each understand the concept of your brand and idea behind your business. While filtering the right influencers you should be very careful about selecting the relevant ones and once you confirm with one influencer, it is important you stick to the same without any hoping. This helps the influencer learn more about your brand and showcase the same understanding to its massive fan following as well.

• Battling Between Popularity and Influence: Brands do make a mistake of considering popularity and influence in digital marketing as two similar things. However, these are different concepts of influencer marketing. The campaign may have the power to make your brand popular but to influence the purchase decisions of your target audience needs some more inspiring and influential.

• Focusing on Irrelevant Metrics: When undergoing a marking program, measuring the metrics is most common activity for all brands. However, brands should go beyond that and do understand that no results are achieved overnight. There are possibilities that you keep measuring the metrics that may prove to be irrelevant and in turn you lose the focus on your organizational goals.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is a profitable venture with tremendous potential for improved business success and growth with new dimensions. However, few wrong decisions and initiatives in the process of marketing programs can prove to be tricky and lead you to failure. Hence, it is important to stay alert and patient at every stage with complete focus on your objective. Knowing the reasons why brand fail at influencer marketing, you will be in a better situation to handle your campaign with better understanding and improved insights. The goal is all yours if you have the heart to win.

About the Author Sohel Ather

This is a guest post from Sohel Ather, a head of content marketing department. He is passionate about tech writing and loves to work on Guest posting, SEO, CRO, Growth Hacking and Online Marketing Strategies. You can follow him on LinkedIn.